Adium 1.4.3 is now available. For the full list of changes and all the gory details see the release notes.

Here are a few of the more prominent changes:

Facebook Chat
Facebook will now connect via the officially-sanctioned mechanism (Facebook page on the API). You no longer have to provide Adium with your username and password; when you first log in, you will be prompted to authenticate via a facebook.com window. Existing Facebook Chat accounts are upgraded automatically.

MSN
We reverted Adium 1.4.2’s change to libpurple’s MNP16 support from MSNP15. This should fix direct file transfers, user icons, and receiving custom emoticons, while disabling multiple points of presence (MPOP). We determined that this was the better trade-off based on user feedback.

Other important changes
We also fixed Twitter connectivity for many, a common crash, and activated the overlay scrollers for Lion.

Support and development
As always, if you find a bug or have a question, please refer to the Help page.

If you’re experiencing problems, we recommend switching to the official XMPP implementation of Facebook Chat due to its increased stability instead of using Adium’s custom implementation which relied on the pidgin-facebookchat plugin.

You can find instructions on how to set up Facebook Chat via XMPP on the FacebookChat page of the Adium Wiki. Facebook has also released instructions.

We hope to offer a migration path from the old to the new implementation of Facebook Chat in a future version of Adium.

Adium 1.3.8 is now available. This release contains the connection fixes for Facebook chat, as well as a small fix for Snow Leopard users to fix the events list. There’s more Snow Leopard fixes on the upcoming 1.4 beta release which we felt were too broad of changes to include in the 1.3.8 release, sorry. An updated beta for 1.4 with the Facebook fix will be coming shortly through the usual channels. Enjoy!

NB: If you’re getting the CAPTCHA popup, disconnect and wait 10 minutes before you try to connect again. CAPTCHA itself isn’t working, but the message just means to calm down trying to connect.

Due to what appears to be a protocol change, Facebook chat is currently not working. The author of our Facebook plugin is working on a fix. We’ll keep you posted on any new releases that fix it.

In the meantime, feel free to send Facebook some feedback about wanting an official (as in, we don’t mimic the web browser) Facebook chat protocol. If they implement something that isn’t subject to breaking, we’d be able to avoid problems such as this.